The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism

Lance Morrow's book "The Noise of Typewriters" explores the impact of journalism on history over the last 100 years, featuring profiles of notable figures in print journalism and examining the moral politics of reporting such as Walter Duranty's praise of Stalin and John Hersey's Hiroshima.

Format: Hardback
Length: 200 pages
Publication date: 13 April 2023
Publisher: Encounter Books,USA

"Poetry makes nothing happen," famously wrote W.H. Auden, but journalism is a different matter entirely. In a remarkable study that is, in part, a memoir of his 40 years as an essayist and critic at TIME magazine, Lance Morrow returns to the Age of Typewriters and to the extraordinary cast of characters that defined the 20th century: statesmen and dictators, saints and heroes, liars and monsters, and the reporters, editors, and publishers who interpreted their deeds. He explores how journalism has touched the history of the last 100 years, shaped it, distorted it, and often proved decisive in its outcomes.

Lord Beaverbrook once referred to journalism as "the black art." Morrow delves into the case of Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent who published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series praising Stalin just as Stalin imposed mass starvation upon the people of Ukraine and the North Caucasus to enforce the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. Millions died.

On the other hand, John Hersey's Hiroshima has been all but sanctified, hailed as the 20th century's greatest piece of journalism. Was it? Morrow examines the complex moral politics of Hersey's reporting, which the New Yorker first published in 1946.

The Noise of Typewriters is, among other things, an intensely personal study of an age that has all but vanished. Morrow is the son of two journalists who got their start covering Roosevelt and Truman. When Morrow and Carl Bernstein were young, they worked together as dictation typists at the Washington Star (a newspaper now extinct). Bernstein had dedicated Chasing History, his memoir of those days, to Morrow. It was Morrow's friend and editor Walter Isaacson—biographer of Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs—who taught Morrow how to use a computer when the personal computer was first introduced.

Morrow's journey through the world of journalism is a fascinating one, filled with insights and anecdotes that shed light on the power of words and the impact of journalism on society. His writing is elegant and evocative, and his analysis of the events and characters he encounters is thought-provoking and nuanced. The Noise of Typewriters is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of journalism and the role it has played in shaping the world we live in today."

Dimension: 215 x 139 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781641772280